Tag: inequality

The Possibility Of A Dark, Frightening Side To The Future Of Work

The Possibility Of A Dark, Frightening Side To The Future Of Work

getty There could be a dark side to the future of work. The adverse effects of the pandemic may restructure society—and not in the way we want. The rich will get richer and the middle class and poor will face grave financial and career challenges.

We’ll see the emergence of tech-savvy, Orwellian corporations spying on you. There’s a strong possibility that we’re fast heading toward a new medieval feudalistic society, as people will be thrusted unwillingly into the gig economy, contract work and forced into retirement—due to lack of alternatives. Workers will need to cope with chronic underemployment and unemployment. […]

Reinventing Society With Intelligent Automation

Reinventing Society With Intelligent Automation

getty The idea of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” was coined in 2016 by Klaus Schwab , executive chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum. The first revolution brought the steam engine, the second mass production and the third digital technology. Each of these brought along massive disruptions and fundamentally transformed our modern societies. We are now entering into the fourth industrial revolution, brought along by connected and intelligent technologies, of which intelligent automation (IA) is a central component .

In this article, I discuss five critical imperatives that will ensure the success of our society’s journey with IA in […]

Down and out: Pandemic-induced automation and labour market disparities of COVID-19

Down and out: Pandemic-induced automation and labour market disparities of COVID-19

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, it quickly became apparent that initial job losses from the ensuing economic crisis tended to be concentrated among low-wage workers (Cajner et al. 2020), women (Alon et al. 2020), and members of some minority groups (Fairlie et al. 2020). With the promise of an effective vaccine becoming widely available in 2021, attention turns to how these hard-hit demographic groups will fare in the post-COVID-19 economy.

Autor and Reynolds (2020) make a compelling case that the dwindling employment prospects currently facing low-wage workers may persist after the pandemic ends. They point out that the continued use […]

The 5-minute shopping spree. How robots are turbo-charging your online orders

The 5-minute shopping spree. How robots are turbo-charging your online orders

Is Canada keeping up with automation? Grocery giant Sobeys has bet on big tech with a massive new warehouse in Vaughan, Ont.

Its robotic, automated warehouse is the only one of its kind in Canada, and it’s the launching pad for automated online grocery home delivery across the greater Toronto area.

The robots manoeuvre their way around a giant warehouse, called “the hive,” moving at an astonishing speed of four metres per second.“By centrally controlling everything in this automated warehouse, we have better control over the freshness and the quality. We know everything coming in and we know everything going out,” […]

Why You Should Read “The Rise of The Robots” by Martin Ford

Why You Should Read “The Rise of The Robots” by Martin Ford

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash At General Motor’s peak in 1979, GM earned $11 billion and employed 850,000 workers. In 2012, Google earned $14 billion (1979 value) with 38,000 employees. Although technology creates new jobs, we can all agree that the employment prospects are not that bright for the labor force. Simply stated, the future is full of robots, but there are very few jobs for humans. This is surely unsettling.

As employees, we are all understandably anxious about the upcoming automation and AI revolution. As robots, machines, and algorithms do our jobs quicker and better than us, will […]

How to Fix Work

How to Fix Work

Automation isn’t happening because robots are coming for our jobs, but because we’ve been designing our jobs for robots, Liam Grace-Flood argues. (Photo by The People Speak! / CC BY-NC 2.0 )

The phrase “future of work” implies a certain inevitability. Despite their tendency to dehumanize and exclude, automation, remote and gig work have long been forecasted and proselytized by think tanks and management consulting firms. The coronavirus pandemic has made it feel all the more inevitable, in that we are already living it. But we may not have to.

As a Summer Fellow with the Boston Mayor’s Office of New […]

Post-Work Migration and the End of America

Post-Work Migration and the End of America

People have always moved to live, from early agrarian societies seeking fertile land to the undocumented workforce that currently powers this country’s agricultural sector. More recent, though, are the systematized and codified restrictions on that movement—telling us who can move where and for how long—and one of their preeminent categories through which this sorting is done has been the all-encompassing notion of “work.”

In the United States, where much of that migration is currently directed, there were more than 28 million foreign-born people working as of 2019, collectively comprising more than 17 percent of the country’s entire workforce. Most are […]

Smart manufacturing for MSMEs: How small businesses can overcome barriers to Industry 4.0 adoption

Smart manufacturing for MSMEs: How small businesses can overcome barriers to Industry 4.0 adoption

Fourth Industrial Revolution new-age business model, smart corporations and digitally-enabled MSMEs can enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: As the pandemic propels a speedy shift towards automation, micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) need to be made part of this transition to ensure more inclusive growth and faster poverty alleviation. The Coronavirus outbreak caught digitally unschooled companies on the back foot. In the aftermath of the pandemic, industrial automation has seen an acceleration across sectors as it had a visible impact on operations in factories due to the fear of infections. Conversely, digital natives managed […]

“The social movements of our time are explosive”: Aaron Benanav on robots and revolution

“The social movements of our time are explosive”: Aaron Benanav on robots and revolution

On 10 October 1989, a helicopter bound for Atlantic City crashed, killing everyone on board. Among the dead were three top executives of Donald Trump’s casinos in the famous New Jersey coastal resort. “No better human beings ever existed” Trump said in a statement following the tragic incident, evidently already master of semantic evacuation via hyperbole on sombre occasions. Trump also claimed he was supposed to be on the helicopter, but changed his mind at the last minute, which a former Trump Organisation official called a “total lie”.

One of the executives killed was the 33-year-old vice-president of the Trump […]

Pandemic, automation and perpetuation of inequality

Pandemic, automation and perpetuation of inequality

Robots are gradually replacing human labour, increasing production and unemployment Reuters Making furniture requires human touch, as we have been accustomed to see for years. But a visit to a prominent furnishers’ factory last year buried that age-long notion of mine. The short visit to that factory was almost like a journey to wonderland for a layman – huge machines processing wood, robotic arms bending up and down and spraying colour on furniture, requiring minimum human engagement.

For the last couple of years, the buzzword in production and economic literature is automation. Even Bangladesh, a labour-intensive RMG export-based economy, is […]